Dredge Economies

[Dredge Economies cover, Image by Takuma Ono]

Over the summer of 2012 I had the priviledge of continuaing some of my thesis research as it overlapped with Takuma Ono's work while he was the first fellow of the Maeder-York Family Fellowship in Landscape Studies at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

As we enter uncharted territory of climate change, and possibly burst through a climate tipping threshold, humanity looks to macro-scale design for consciously self-guiding the evolution of the biosphere. While strategies that reduce risk - such as conserving energy or coping - have their own merits, those which promote transformational adaptations have increasingly important roles in this era.

[Image from book by Takuma Ono, rendering by Adam E. Anderson]

Dredge Economies is of this strain of macro-scale thinking that imagines a transformational relationship between the anthropologic, biologic, and geologic; it imagines a way to confront the adverse effects of dredging while still acknowledging the role of containerization in a globalizedeconomy; it looks at large patterns/trends and imagines cultivating the fields of the harbor in anticipation of accelerated change; it imagines making net positive impacts over time; above all, it imagines a designed process that could help balance the human condition with the evolutionary time scale of the biosphere.